Wealthfront Review + $5,000 Managed Free

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The key to a prosperous financial life is mastering the two-step process of saving money, then investing those savings responsibly to build wealth. Although saving money is often a straightforward task, the process of investing can be overwhelming to individuals just getting started.

Wealthfront was created to solve this problem, offering personalized investment portfolios (and financial advice) without the high fees and account minimums of traditional wealth managers.

Wealthfront has combined the best of modern technology with rigorous investment research to provide diversified, low-cost, tax-efficient investment portfolios and a variety of valuable features for one transparent fee.

Wealthfront offers the Cash Cow Community their first $5,000 managed free. For balances larger than $5,000, the management fee is a flat 0.25% per year.

An Introduction to Wealthfront

Since launching in December of 2011, Wealthfront has grown into one of the largest, most sophisticated robo-advisors in existence. Slightly smaller than competitor Betterment, Wealthfront is the second largest independent robo-advisor in the world with nearly $12 Billion in client assets under management.

Much of this success can be attributed to Wealthfront’s team of experts. CEO Andy Rachleff is chairman of the endowment investment committee at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty member at Stanford’s School of Business. He was previously the co-founder of Benchmark Capital.

The investment team is led by Burton Malkiel, Ph.D., who is the Professor Emeritus of Economics at Princeton University and author of the best-selling A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Other members of the investment committee hold a Ph.D. in finance and/or the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

How Wealthfront Works

Getting started with Wealthfront takes less than ten minutes. The entire onboarding process can be completed free of charge with no strings attached. Account funding is the last step in the process, should you choose to proceed.

1) Create a free account

When creating a free Wealthfront account, the first thing you will be asked is whether you would like to build a financial plan or begin investing (I’ll describe both options, in detail, later in this review). You will be able to take advantage of both options simultaneously after creating your Wealthfront account, so don’t worry about choosing the wrong option.

2) Select your goals

Whether you first select “start investing” or “build a financial plan” doesn’t much matter, as both options are made available at any time. With that said, portfolio management is the only paid service offered by Wealthfront, with financial advice being a free option for all customers.

Whichever option you select will lead to a series of questions. The investment-related questions are designed to help Wealthfront recommend a personalized investment portfolio. The financial planning questions are designed to help you plan for the future.

Ultimately, both questionnaires find their way home in your Wealthfront Dashboard, where you will simultaneously manage all investment accounts alongside your personal financial goals.

3) Finalize your account

Using the answers that you’ve provided, Wealthfront will recommend a personalized investment portfolio and the appropriate type of investment account that you should open. You may ignore the recommendation and select your own account(s) and preferred asset allocation at any time. After you have selected your preferred investment portfolio, you then link an external bank account to transfer funds to/from Wealthfront.

On the financial planning side, Wealthfront will ask you to securely link external accounts so that their advice algorithm will understand your complete financial situation and make appropriate recommendations. This is entirely optional, and there is no obligation to link external accounts or use any of the free financial planning tools provided by Wealthfront.

4) Live your life

Let’s not forget, Wealthfront’s core value proposition is providing efficient, automated portfolio management. That is what you are paying 0.25% annually to receive, and that is what Wealthfront does best.

Once you hire Wealthfront to create and manage your personalized investment portfolio, they take care of everything. That includes selecting appropriate investments, rebalancing your asset allocation, advanced tax-loss harvesting, and all of the other features described later in my review. Take advantage of their expertise by spending your precious time and energy doing something other than managing your portfolio.

*Please Note*

The remainder of this review provides a detailed explanation of Wealthfront’s investment recommendations and expansive list of features. Given my Ph.D. in financial planning, I’m interested in the nitty-gritty details, but I also recognize that some readers might find this information boring or overly complicated.

If you would like to exit now and test the service yourself, our referral link guarantees that your first $5,000 invested at Wealthfront will be managed free of charge. Wealthfront charges 0.25% annually on balances in excess of $5,000 (which is $25, annually, per $10,000 invested).

Wealthfront’s Investment Process

Should you hire Wealthfront to manage your investments, you will first complete a risk tolerance questionnaire and then have the opportunity to review Wealthfront’s investment recommendations before funding your account. Here is how that takes place:

1) Answer a few questions

The first step is to select your primary investment goal. You can choose between retirement savings, general savings, college education, or something else entirely. Your answer will allow Wealthfront to suggest the optimal type of investment account.

Wealthfront then asks you to complete seven multiple-choice questions about your investment preferences. The questionnaire is designed to assess your willingness and ability to tolerate investment risk, and Wealthfront uses this information to recommend an appropriate blend of investments (called asset allocation).

2) View investment recommendations

After you complete the questionnaire, Wealthfront will explain your assessed risk tolerance on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest risk level. When I went through the process, I scored a 10/10, which is not surprising. I have a long investment horizon and high level of risk tolerance.

Traditionally, risk-tolerant investors will own more stocks than bonds, because stocks have historically offered the greatest growth potential of any common asset class. However, Wealthfront allows you to select your preferred asset allocation regardless of their recommendation.

Using your assessed risk tolerance, Wealthfront recommends a diversified investment portfolio that varies by account type. If you are opening a taxable account, Wealthfront recommends select ETFs to increase your expected after-tax return. If you are opening a retirement account, Wealthfront recommends a slightly different set of ETFs to maximize potential growth.

Wealthfront recommends ETFs instead of mutual funds because ETFs have lower expenses and receive preferential tax treatment, making them a better overall investment vehicle. The asset allocation between these various ETFs ensures that your investment portfolio is not weighted too heavily in any specific asset class, company, country, or sector, which ultimately reduces overall investment risk.

For Taxable Accounts, Wealthfront recommends a combination of the following ETFs:

By combining these various ETFs, Wealthfront clients are able to own thousands of stocks and bonds issued by corporations and governments across the globe at a very low cost.

For example, here is my recommended portfolio when opening an Individual Retirement Account:

Note, the percentage of each ETF recommended in your portfolio will vary according to your risk tolerance and Wealthfront’s current investment projections, which are updated regularly by the investment committee.

3) Open and fund your account.

If you don’t like Wealthfront’s recommendations, you can modify the asset allocation by manually adjusting your risk tolerance. Once you decide on your preferred portfolio, simply click “next” to save your portfolio and create your Wealthfront account.

Once you create an email/password combo, you then proceed to fund your new account with a minimum of $500. If you aren’t ready to fund your account, you can save Wealthfront’s recommendations to your account and return at a later date.

You can transfer (rollover) existing employer-sponsored accounts into Wealthfront through your online Dashboard, but Wealthfront cannot manage those accounts directly if they are still held at a current/previous employer.

Wealthfront Features

Differentiated Asset Location – Wealthfront uses a different mixture of asset classes for your taxable and retirement accounts. For example, because municipal bond interest is exempt from federal taxation, Wealthfront recommends that muni-bonds be held in a taxable account. On the other hand, corporate bond interest is taxed as ordinary income, which is why Wealthfront recommends they be placed in a tax-sheltered account.

Automated Rebalancing – Wealthfront maintains your desired asset allocation over time. Hypothetically, let’s assume that your portfolio begins with an asset allocation of 50% stocks, 50% bonds. Over time, stocks might outperform bonds resulting in a portfolio comprised of 60% stocks, 40% bonds. That’s not ideal because the portfolio now has more risk than you are comfortable accepting. Rebalancing is the act of returning your asset allocation to 50/50. Wealthfront rebalances the portfolio using efficient methods:

Intelligent Dividend Reinvestment – Wealthfront automatically reinvests all dividends into the asset class that is underperforming, reducing the need to sell investments.

Cash Flow Reinvestment – If you’re adding to your Wealthfront balance over time, they use those funds to automatically purchase the asset class which is underperforming. Again, this maintains your ideal asset allocation without requiring the sale of one asset class (which results in less taxation).

Tax-efficient Withdrawals – When you sell any financial asset in a taxable account, you will realize a gain or loss. The tax consequences of your sale depend on the holding period. If you sell an investment after holding it for 365 days or less, you have a short-term capital gain (or loss). If you sell the investment after holding it for 366 days or longer, that is considered a long-term gain (or loss). Short-term capital gains are treated as ordinary income, while long-term capital gains are taxed a preferential tax rate.

When you request a withdrawal from your taxable account, some of your investment must be liquidated (sold) so that you can receive cash. Wealthfront offers a withdrawal system that is designed to minimize taxation. First, they sell any positions that will result in no taxable gain. Second, they sell any positions that result in long-term capital gains. As a last resort, they sell the positions that result in short-term capital gains.

Free Financial Planning – Wealthfront launched free financial planning in December 2018. Now, when you download the Wealthfront mobile app, you can choose to get started by building a financial plan — with options for retirement planning, home planning, education planning, and travel planning — before opening an investment account.

Passive-Plus Investing and Tax-Loss Harvesting

Wealthfront now offers four unique features designed to increase your return on investment and reduce your tax liability.

1) Daily Tax-Loss Harvesting – Free for all taxable Wealthfront accounts, tax-loss harvesting is the process of selling investments that have declined in value and replacing those investments with highly correlated alternatives.

By selling an investment at a loss, you earn the right to deduct that loss from your taxable income – thus lowering your annual tax burden. By replacing the original investment with a highly correlated alternative, the risk and return profile of your portfolio is unchanged, even as you gain tax savings. These tax savings can then be reinvested to further grow the value of your portfolio.

At Wealthfront, when one of your ETFs drops in value it is automatically sold and quickly replaced by a highly correlated alternative.

2) Stock-level Tax-Loss Harvesting– Available to clients with $100,000 or more invested in a taxable account, Wealthfront will create your own index portfolio, harvesting losses among individual stocks. This feature is unique to Wealthfront and cannot be found anywhere else.

Instead of using a single ETF investment to implement the U.S. stock allocation of a portfolio (typically Vanguard’s Total Stock Index (VTI)), Stock-level Tax-Loss Harvesting replaces VTI with individual securities.

Thus, if a single stock in the portfolio is down in value, it can be sold to harvest losses (even if the overall market is up). In Wealthfront’s standard index ETF portfolios, no tax-loss harvesting benefit would be available unless the U.S. stock market ETF (VTI) declined in value.

Wealthfront offers three levels of Stock-level Tax-Loss Harvesting to clients:

Wealthfront 100: Available now for taxable accounts of $100,000, the Wealthfront 100 will utilize up to 100 of the largest capitalization stocks from the S&P 500 combined with specific ETFs to provide US stock market coverage equivalent to Vanguard’s Total Stock Market ETF (VTI).

Wealthfront 500: Available now for taxable accounts of $500,000, the Wealthfront 500 utilizes up to 500 stocks from the S&P 500 combined with the Vanguard Extended Market ETF (VXF) to provide US stock market coverage equivalent to Vanguard’s Total Stock Market ETF (VTI).

Wealthfront 1000: Available now for taxable accounts of $1,000,000, the Wealthfront 1000 utilizes up to 1000 stocks from the S&P 1500 combined with the Vanguard Small-Cap ETF (VB) to provide US stock market coverage equivalent to Vanguard’s Total Stock Market ETF (VTI).

Wealthfront has written a few research-oriented white papers on the topic of tax-loss harvesting. They conclude that a portfolio including Wealthfront’s Daily Tax-Loss Harvesting service and Stock-level Tax-Loss Harvesting service could add up to 2.03% annually in additional investment returns (compared to VTI only)

Smart Beta blends five single-factor strategies (value, momentum, high dividend yield, low market beta, and low volatility) with the cap-weighted market index (VTI) to generate a new modified index. This new index then serves as the benchmark for the tax-loss harvesting algorithm in your portfolio.

Historically, this strategy has provided additional portfolio gains and more opportunities for tax-loss harvesting. When combined with the Daily Tax-Loss Harvesting and Stock-level Tax Loss Harvesting features previously described, Wealthfront estimates the overall after-tax benefit to be as much as 3% each year, as discussed in their latest research.

4) Risk Parity – At the beginning of 2018, Wealthfront introduced the newest PassivePlus strategy, Risk Parity, which aims to increase your risk-adjusted returns in a wide range of market environments through an enhanced asset allocation strategy. This new strategy is available as part of a diversified portfolio for Wealthfront clients with taxable investment accounts of $100,000 or more.

The key benefit of Risk Parity is the way it balances the risk of an investment portfolio, which will increase your portfolio’s average annual expense ratio. Wealthfront structured this Risk Parity implementation as a mutual fund in order to preserve the value they offer through their Tax-Loss-Harvesting and Portfolio Line of Credit. Just as the ETFs they use have an associated expense ratio, the Wealthfront Risk Parity Fund has an expense ratio of 0.25%. Fortunately, your weighted average annual expense ratio will only increase by 0.03%.

Risk Parity is designed to increase your long-term net-of-fees, after-tax, risk-adjusted returns, and you can select this investment strategy in your account settings.

Portfolio Line of Credit

Wealthfront’s Portfolio Line of Credit offers you access to immediate cash without disrupting your investment strategy. Wealthfront clients with an account valued at $100,000 or more have immediate access to the line of credit.

Interest Rate: Your line of credit is secured by your diversified investment portfolio, and current borrowing rates depend on the size of your portfolio.

Complete Flexibility: Borrow the amount you need, when you need, for any reason. Then repay on your own schedule.

No Application or Fees: If your account is eligible, you have a line of credit. Simple as that. No paperwork, credit checks, or application process. Just request the cash (up to 30% of the current value of your Wealthfront account) and Wealthfront sends you the money as quickly as one business day.

This line of credit is an excellent way to obtain cash, should you ever need immediate liquidity. Many of Wealthfront’s clients use PLOC to pay tax bills, down payment on a home, etc.

Path

Path is Wealthfront’s financial planning experience – free for all customers. Path allows you to link all of your external financial accounts through your Wealthfront Dashboard.

You can track your financial progress in real time. Path uses your real transaction history to calculate a rolling 12-month average of how much you’ve been saving and spending, then provides advice on how to achieve your financial goals using this data.

If that’s something you’re interested in, take a look at this video:

Home Planning with Path

In 2018, Wealthfront expanded Path to help clients plan for a future home purchase. Here are some the features included in this update:

Personalized Home Affordability Estimate: Path uses third-party data on home prices and mortgage rates combined with your financial information to provide an accurate estimate of what you can expect to afford when it’s time to purchase a home. Path’s home affordability estimate even accounts for expenses beyond the mortgage, such as closing costs, property taxes, maintenance, and insurance.

Saving and Goal Tradeoffs: Path makes recommendations on which accounts are best to save for a home, how much to save each month, and provides a realistic time frame for the purchase. You can also interactively explore the impact of saving more or saving for a longer period of time, and how this will affect your existing financial goals.

Virtual House Hunting: Path links to Redfin, allowing you to virtual house hunt in locations across the country. You can see what’s possible with affordability estimates, and even track specific neighborhoods for real-time market fluctuations.

Home Planning in Retirement: Home equity can be a powerful asset to utilize in retirement. Path projects the value of your purchased home in the future and allows you to try on different scenarios to see how your financial status will change if you sold or downsized in retirement.

With this addition, Path is one of the most comprehensive financial planning tools available today (and entirely free for Wealthfront clients).

College Planning with Path

In addition to home planning, Path now includes customized college planning advice. With this addition, Path walks you through every important aspect of college planning and delivers a complete, personalized assessment in three steps:

You Select A College – Wealthfront connects to every U.S. college to calculate the estimated cost of tuition, room and board, books, etc. You can change your desired school at any time and the data will update automatically.

Path Calculates Financial Aid – Using outside data for each college and their specific approach to calculating financial aid, along with the personal details that you’ve shared through Path, Wealthfront provides a customized estimate of financial aid per school.

Path Shows You How Much You Can Pay For – Path will show you how far your estimated savings will go towards covering college expenses. Just like with retirement, you can adjust the inputs to see the impact of increased savings.

Wealthfront is the only robo-advisor offering a cost-effective 529 plan and a personalized college planning service all in one.

Wealthfront Security and Protection

Wealthfront protects your investments through the following measures:

SIPC Insurance: Wealthfront is protected by SIPC insurance. This insurance covers up to $500,000 in securities for each type of account you hold with Wealthfront. An IRA is considered a different type of account than a taxable account for this purpose, but different types of IRA accounts are considered one account for this purpose. SIPC insurance also covers up to $250,000 in cash.

Third party custodian: Your assets are held in an account at RBC. Wealthfront only has the right to issue trading instructions against your account. The firm cannot access your money, other than to receive the agreed upon advisory fee. You are the only one who can deposit into, or withdraw from your account.

No rehypothecation: Wealthfront clients only have cash accounts (not margin accounts) at RBC. That means at no time can the cash or securities held in your account be loaned out or borrowed by Wealthfront.

Everything in street name: Wealthfront only invests in SIPC covered securities registered in street name at the Depository Trust Company (DTC). That means the securities purchased on your behalf by Wealthfront are held separately from other Wealthfront assets and remain fully insured.

Wealthfront Fees

For all of the services described in this review, Wealthfront charges an advisory fee of 0.25% per year. Cash Cow Couple readers receive their first $5,000 managed free.

Wealthfront clients incur no other fees outside of the 0.25% advisory fee. There are no trading commissions, custodial fees, or exit fees if you close your account.

Keep in mind that although Wealthfront charges no additional fees, you will have to pay fees for the underlying ETFs that you own through Wealthfront. You would pay these even if you managed your own portfolio. These are typically around 0.10% annually on top of the 0.25% management fee.

Once you have an account opened and funded, you can get an additional $5,000 managed free for each friend that you invite who opens and funds their account. The person invited gets an additional $5,000 managed for free as well. That’s $5,000 for both people involved. There’s no limit to the amount you can get managed for free and these funds are managed free for as long as the account remains open.

Possible Drawbacks

No fractional share investing – Betterment and M1 Finance allow investors to utilize fractional shares, but Wealthfront does not. For example, if an ETF costs $125 per share today, but you only have $100 available in your investment account, these other firms will allow you to purchase a partial share. At Wealthfront, no investment would occur until your account balance exceeds $125.

No cash equivalent investments – At Wealthfront, your money is invested in a blend of stock and bond ETFs. Financial markets are risky, and you can lose your money even in their most conservative portfolio. If you are a very risk averse investor, or if you need immediate access to your funds, consider a high-yield savings account.

No customization – Wealthfront recommends a diversified set of ETFs to everyone, but no customization is allowed. For example, if you would rather choose a different type of real estate investment or trade individual stocks, that’s not allowed. The Wealthfront team makes very good, research-based recommendations, but you can’t replace or delete any of their chosen ETFs.

Wealthfront Review Summary

Wealthfront offers quality asset management and financial planning services for a very reasonable fee. But I think Wealthfront offers even more to a select group of people:

Individuals just getting started: Wealthfront recently lowered their minimum account balance to just $500. When combined with the $5,000 free management offer, Wealthfront is a great option for new investors or individuals wanting to test the service.

Young professionals and families: Wealthfront is focused on offering services and features that directly address the needs of young professionals. The Wealthfront 529 College Savings Plan and Path (Financial Planning) are examples of unique services designed to help young families manage their finances.

Individuals who have an extensive network: All investors who sign up through our website begin with $5,000 managed free, but each additional referral results in an additional $5,000 managed free. Someone with an extensive network could have a sizable portfolio managed for free.

Individuals with $100,000 or more to invest in a taxable account: Retirement accounts don’t count because no tax-loss harvesting is available. Taxable account balances in excess of $100,000 receive Wealthfront’s Passive Plus suite of tools, which become increasingly valuable as your account balance grows.

In my opinion, Wealthfront is the most advanced robo-advisor in existence. Over the past year, Wealthfront added several innovative features, including financial and college planning, a portfolio line of credit, and the Passive Plus suite of tax reduction tools. Despite the ongoing innovation, the fee remains a modest 0.25% annually.

Editorial Disclaimer: The editorial content on this page is not provided by any of the companies mentioned, and has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities. Opinions expressed here are author’s alone.

User Generated Content Disclosure: Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser’s responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Are you aware if Wealthfront offers an Self directed 401k account also. They have documents explaining what it is but i could not find an option.

Thanks
Gunjan.

Reply

September 25, 2018 12:23 am

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Gunjan, I’ve not seen that as a viable option when opening an account. If you contact Wealthfront directly, do you mind leaving another comment and letting me know what they say?

Reply

September 28, 2018 9:13 pm

Guest

Jeff

When did Wealthfront stop doing the first $10k managed free?

Reply

July 27, 2018 1:35 pm

Guest

Ian

Thank you for the detailed review. However, I noticed recently that the suggested allocations have changed when opening an account. Specifically, “natural resources” have disappeared, VIG has been removed from retirement accounts, and the portfolio allocations have changed as well. Do you happen to know why they have implemented those changes? Thanks!

Reply

June 19, 2018 6:18 am

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Ian,
Thank you for the kind words and information. I’m currently discussing the possible changes with Wealthfront. I want to make sure any they’ve implemented are permanent before further editing my review.

Reply

June 27, 2018 10:16 am

Guest

Stephen

This seems like a great opportunity to start investing for those that are a) not sure where to start or b) just getting started. I like how easy they make everything. Of course, I’m sure anyone could invest with them, but I see this as a great starting point. A very in-depth article, thanks for sharing.

Reply

April 9, 2018 2:32 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Stephen,
I completely agree. Thanks for stopping by.

Reply

April 10, 2018 2:28 pm

Guest

Daniel Steve Villarreal

Hi, I’m an American expat (citizen & passport-holder) and a permanent resident of Taiwan with no US address. Am I eligible? I’ve found it difficult to invest because of FATCA–American (and now Taiwanese, because of US gummint red tape) won’t let me. What about Wealthfront? Thanks!

Reply

March 28, 2018 9:16 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Daniel,
I believe Wealthfront still requires a US address. If you attempt to signup, please let us know so that other readers can benefit from this knowledge.

Reply

March 29, 2018 3:19 pm

Guest

Brian

Jacob, I’m a Wealthfront customer for about 6 months, and when I look at my contributions 8300 and my total value of the portfolio as being 8540, with a time weight and money weighted return of 8.5 percent. With a simple return of 2.1 percent. Granted there was a larger percentage of the money invested in the last month or so. Am I being duped here or perhaps I just don’t understand the math?

Reply

August 16, 2017 6:56 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Brian,
Your time-weighted return is 8.5%, which is what financial markets have delivered in that time period. When you invest through Wealthfront, you own diversified index funds that represent global financial markets, and the return you receive is equivalent to the weighted average of these funds. Wealthfront is doing nothing more or less than offering you a diversified portfolio, which is exactly what most investors need.

Reply

August 17, 2017 12:05 pm

Guest

Mark

I have been investing in Wealthfront for about 2 years. I moved an old IRA to Wealthfront, and I have been investing taxable funds as well. So far I am very happy with them. But the harvested losses are adding up and I can only deduct 3k per year on my taxes. What advantage does this have if I cannot take the deduction. Am I losing through increased trading of my account?

Reply

July 26, 2017 9:41 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Any harvested losses are carried forward and can be used in future tax years.

Reply

July 27, 2017 9:21 am

Guest

Ray Alex

And that’s why more people with larger eggs are using them. The harvested losses for those with multiple retirement vehicles will easily offset Wealthfront s fees when you get to mid 50’s and 60’s and start making the typical defensive and income producing moves. Tax loss harvesting is something those of us with day jobs find very tedious, Wealthfront is worth employing for that feature alone.

Reply

July 9, 2018 7:09 pm

Guest

Don

I am considering opening a $2500 Roth IRA with Wealthfront. I would like to keep the money available in case I should need to use it. Is this a wise choice, or would it be better to not use an IRA for this purpose? Thanks.

Reply

June 21, 2017 12:01 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

You can always withdraw your original contributions from a Roth IRA without penalty.

Reply

June 21, 2017 4:07 pm

Guest

Wilson

I’m 19 and I’ve done 2 summer internships and have a few thousand dollars that I would like to invest and I think Wealthfront would be great for opening up a Roth IRA. What my concern is that I don’t have any knowledge about investing in stocks and bonds. I know that Wealthfront makes you take a risk test which will determine how your assets would be allocated. For example let’s say Wealthfront puts 70% in stocks, 20% in bonds, and 10% in real estate. What does that really mean? How can I watch the stock market to determine how… Read more »

Reply

June 7, 2017 2:25 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Wilson,
Wealthfront does all of the portfolio management for you. You can log into your account and view all of your investments and the rate of return. It’s a great online interface.

Reply

June 7, 2017 5:24 pm

Guest

natalie

Hi, have a personal investment account at wealthfront. So far I’m pleased with an overall 5% rate of return in 4 months. I have a 401k (non matching) and pension plan with work so this additional account is more of a long term savings (not roth eligible). My question is, given that it is liquid, is there any value is putting some money in there that I DO plan to use in the relatively near future? I have a vehicle I’m selling, but plan to use the money in about 6 months to purchase a new one. I’d like that… Read more »

Reply

June 6, 2017 12:42 pm

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Natalie, you can go either way. The tradeoff is between risk and reward. The credit union is very low risk and reward. Wealthfront portfolios are invested in stocks/bonds, which means you could make money in 6 months or experience a loss. Future returns are uncertain (risky).

Reply

June 6, 2017 1:32 pm

Guest

Elizabeth

I’m in my early 40s and starting a Roth IRA for the first time. Wealthfront seems like a great option; however, if I decide I don’t like it, are there penalties for moving my investment elsewhere? If I wanted to change companies how would I go about doing it?

Also is the .025% fee considered low for the industry? With max contribution I will be >$10K in less than two years. Thanks!

Reply

May 28, 2017 9:36 am

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

You can ACH your funds to another company at any time, without penalty.

Reply

May 29, 2017 6:11 pm

Guest

Pree

Thanks!
Currently, given my age, my portfolios (IRA, and 401K) is at high risk (>90% stocks). I was going to structure the wealthfront account as more moderate risk. What do you think is a good stock to bond ratio: 60/40, 70/30 etc.?

Thanks again for your help. Really appreciate it!

Reply

March 29, 2017 8:59 am

Author

Jacob Lumby, PhD

Hi Pree,
Your optimal asset allocation depends on your risk tolerance and many other personal factors. I would recommend that you choose an allocation that makes you comfortable for the long haul. More stocks means the potential for higher returns, but also the potential for significant losses. Bonds are much more stable, with a lower average return.

Reply

March 29, 2017 11:06 am

Guest

Philip Faulconer

Great and thorough write-up on Wealthfront! One thing with Wealthfront is that, as you point out, you can’t explicitly modify their allocations for you. But the questions you answer in the risk assessment determine your risk tolerance which they encapsulate as a numeric “Risk Score”. While you’re able to influence your asset allocations directly, you are able to change your Risk Score once every thirty days. This gives you the ability to tweak their asset allocation strategy for your account to be more conservative or more aggressive within their strategy and allocation templates. I point this out because I’ve created… Read more »

Reply

January 21, 2017 1:36 pm

Guest

Russ

Philip-

I was thinking of taking some ideal money (capital one money market of 1.30%) and doing the same. I had not thought about the low risk idea. I know the market has been relatively good this year; however, can you please share your performance results and overall thoughts?

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